We continue to receive PRs (e.g. #24429) to remove "experimental" from the README and to add a link to the white paper. To prevent us from receiving these PRs add "(arguably)" in front of experimental and remove any reference to the white paper.
The intention is to save time of reviewers (and new PR authors). If this does more harm than good feel free to close this PR.
add "(arguably)" in front of experimental and
ACK
Other word can be 'debatable' in bracket and both look good according to https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/221305/whats-the-difference-between-arguable-and-debatable
remove any reference to the white paper
NACK
Bah, prefer not to bother with this. (arguably) experimental sounds really awful to me sentence-wise. And I don't see any reason to bury even a off-hand reference to the existence of the whitepaper. I'd prefer just to keep this as is. People will find reason to do silly PRs nevertheless, we'll continue to ignore them.
Ok I tried :) Closing!
If you really want to be edgy you could add "!!! do not open PRs that change the word experimental or reference to the whitepaper in README.md !!!" to the template text people see when opening a PR :) (no, this is not a serious suggestion)
Personally I don't consider word 'experimental' a big issue because I think even life is an experiment. However, lot of users don't believe Bitcoin is still an experiment so adding a word that describes this situation made sense.
Removing last reference to term whitepaper from readme is not required IMO. In fact whitepaper or link can be added back when we have consensus about it in future.
Close referring COPYING.
https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/blob/a1b532d1a5f02f1ef4c5af52e04072eab9636bb1/COPYING#L16-L18
